Quality Process Domains & Principles

There are five areas that are examined in an academic audit. Each contains a set of questions that should be asked and answered as part of any department's educational activities if it hopes to improve its educational efforts.

1. Determining desired learning outcomes. What should a student who successfully completes the course or departmental major know and be able to do? How will the course or major program build on the student's prior knowledge and abilities? How will it contribute to the student's future employment opportunities, capacity to make social contributions, and quality of life?
2. Designing course content and department curriculum. What will be taught, in what order, and from what perspective? How will the content contribute to the overall students' overall knowledge and learning? What course materials will be used? How will these materials relate to other parts of the students' program?
3. Designing teaching and learning. How will teaching and learning be organized for students? What methods will be used to exposure students to the material for the first time, for answering questions and providing interpretation, for stimulating involvement, and for providing feedback on student work? What roles and responsibilities will the faculty members assume? What other resources will be required and how will they be used?
4. Developing student assessment. What measures and indicators will be used to assess student learning? Will they compare performance at the beginning and end of the term, or simply look at the end result? How will the long-term outcomes of the students' experiences be determined? Will baseline and trend information be available? Who will be responsible for assessment? How will the assessment results be used?
5. Implementing quality education. How will faculty members assure themselves and others that content is delivered as intended, that teaching and learning processes be implemented consistently, and that assessments are performed as planned and their results used effectively?

Seven Educational Quality Principles

Departments can use seven common-sense principles to improve the quality of their academic programs. While these practices have some roots in business, government, and health care, these specific practices come from academia.

1. Define education quality in terms of outcomes. The quality of student learning, not teaching per se, is what ultimately matters. Learning should pertain to what is or will become important for the students enrolled in the program (not some an "ideal" student). Exemplary departments figure out what their students need and then work to meet these needs.
2. Focus on the actual process of teaching and learning. Departments can carefully analyze the methods that faculty members use to teach and how students learn. They can consult the literature in their academic disciplines and look at what works and what does not. They can collect data where possible to see how their students are doing. They can try enhancing active learning and making better use of information technology. Faculty members can experiment with new ways of looking at student learning on a regular basis; methods that have been proven effective in their academic disciplines. They can adopt successful innovations, which become part of the department's modus operandi and form the baseline for future experimentation and improvement.
3. Strive for coherence in their department curriculum and the educational activities they use. Departments should view learning through the lens of the student's entire educational experience. This clearly applies to the department's curriculum, where courses should build upon one another to provide the desired depth and breadth, and how this learning provides the basis for other courses. It also applies to the range of class sizes and learning approaches experienced by the typical student.

   For example, a mix of large lectures and small seminars may well produce better learning than a succession of medium sized classes that consume the same amount of faculty and student time. Additional enrollments make little difference once a lecture exceeds a certain size because the communication is one-way anyhow. However, larger lectures can make room for small seminars that produce more active learning than medium-sized classes with fewer interaction opportunities. Writing, oral presentations, group work, and learning activities that can be used in a range of classes to provide other opportunities for building coherence.

4. Work collaboratively to achieve mutual involvement and support. Faculty members can demonstrate collegiality in teaching, just as they do in their research. Departments can encourage teamwork in order to reinforce collegiality and bring a broader array of talent to bear on difficult problems. Team members can encourage strong efforts by their peers and take each other to task when shortfalls occur. In the end, collegiality and teamwork make the department a "learning organization" with respect to the education quality process.
5. Base decisions on facts wherever possible. Departments should base educational decisions in data instead of simply adopting traditional criteria. For example, a department might collect data on student preparation, learning styles, and probable requirements for employment. Faculty can also obtain feedback from past students and employers to evaluate the relevance of course and program content. In many cases, traditional disciplinary training may not answer these questions except as they pertain to aspiring PhD students. Faculty members can analyze the data carefully in light of disciplinary standards and one's own professional experience, and then incorporate the findings in the design of curricula, learning processes, and assessment methods.
6. Identify and learn from best practice. Departments should seek out examples of good practice from their disciplines and adapt the best of these practices to local circumstances. They can regularly compare good versus average or poor performing programs and students; assess the causes of the differences and then seek ways to mitigate them. Faculty members can attempt to move poor performance toward average performance and average performance toward exemplary performance.
7. Make regular improvement of the department's programs and offerings a high priority. Departments can strive to improve the quality of teaching and learning on a regular basis. While departments may place strong emphasis on research as well as on teaching, they recognize that continuous improvement requires that they also focus on the educational efforts of the department too. Promotion and tenure committees and departmental personnel committees should strike a new balance between teaching, broadly defined, and research. These simple efforts can most importantly affect the attitudes and day-to-day behavior of professors.